Flytenow

» see flytenow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Flytenow only made sense in a country with a great many small airplanes parked at a great many small airports, and there is really only one of those. American general aviation runs on tens of thousands of private pilots who own or rent four-seat aircraft and fly them mostly empty, because building hours costs money and the seats behind you do nothing to defray it. Four people in Boston looked at that in 2013 and saw a matching problem.

The site let a pilot post a trip he was already making, and let someone going the same way ask to come along and split the direct operating costs on a per-head basis. Nobody bought a ticket. Nobody paid the pilot for his time. Flytenow took a connection fee. What made the founders confident was that the FAA had explicitly permitted expense sharing since the 1960s, when the way you found someone to share with was a notice on a bulletin board at the airfield or a phone call to a friend of a friend.

So in February 2014 they did the responsible thing and asked the FAA's chief counsel to confirm it in writing. The answer came back that posting the flight on a website was a different act entirely, because a website reaches the general public, and a pilot who reaches the general public is holding himself out as a carrier. Holding out means common carriage. Common carriage means an air carrier certificate and a maintenance program to match, neither of which a man with a Cessna and a day job is going to produce.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ruling ~

Flytenow took the interpretation to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, arguing that a cost-shared flight with a fixed pro-rata split is not a commercial service no matter what medium was used to arrange it. The case was Flytenow v. FAA, No. 14-1168, and the court came down against them on 18 December 2015. The reasoning was narrow and hard to argue with on its own terms: the statute cares about whether you offer to the public, and the internet is the public.

The company folded that month. AirPooler and PilotShareTheRide.com went with it, since the letter applied to every site doing the same thing. An entire small category closed on the strength of an agency opinion letter, with no fine levied against anyone and no case ever brought.

~ the appeal ~

There was a cert petition, backed by free-speech and tech-policy groups who argued the decision made the medium of the offer the whole test. On 9 January 2017 the Supreme Court declined to hear it, by which point Flytenow had been dead for more than a year and was appealing on principle. Later attempts to get flight sharing written back into law went nowhere in Congress.

The galling part for everyone involved was that Europe went the other way. EASA allows cost-shared flights arranged online, and Wingly has been running that business out of France and the UK ever since. Identical aircraft, identical arrangement, opposite answer. blog.flytenow.com is still up, and the last posts on it are arguments the company already lost.

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